1. Statement of the Technical Field
The present invention relates to collaborative computing environments and, in particular, to collaborative computing environment access restriction and orphan data policy.
2. Description of the Related Art
Collaborative computing provides a means for users to pool their strengths and experiences to achieve a common goal. For example, a common goal may be an educational objective, the completion of a software development project or even creation and use of a system to manage human resources. The establishment of a collaborative computing environment typically involves the creation or definition of a community. The community provides the framework under which the collaborative computing objective is achieved.
A collaborative computing community is defined by (1) a particular context, i.e. the objective of the community, (2) membership, i.e., the participants in the community, and (3) a set of roles for the community members. Roles are names given to persons in the community which dictate access to the community's resources and tools as well as define the behavior of the community members through the implementation of community rules and policies. For example, roles in a community relating to an on-line education system may include Teacher and Student. The role named “Teacher” is likely given access to places and permissions broader is scope than those for the role named “Student”.
Teachers may be given access to class-wide and teachers-only discussion lists and grades databases within the community, while Students may be given access to the class-wide discussion lists and a students-only discussion list. While both roles have access to the class-wide discussion lists, the role named Teacher may be given the ability to create, delete and view discussion threads, while the role named Student may be given access only to view the class-wide discussion lists. Further, Teachers behavior may be defined so that they can initiate or schedule web-based classes while Students can only participate, i.e., join, scheduled classes.
Further, the role named teacher may be able to grant permission to the students to join certain discussion lists or to create a folder which is private to, and only accessible by the student. Under this arrangement, a person is added to a place in a capacity under which the person, the Student in this example, can create new content and edit some existing content. In addition, the person can restrict access to data he/she owns. However, this form of access restriction creates a perception of a certain data security for this person which may not be accurate. Others may really be able to access the data that the person thought was secure. For example, the Teacher in the above example, may have access to the Student's data even though this does not appear to be the case from the Student's perspective. It is therefore desirable to have a system and method under which a person obtains a true and accurate picture of the third party accesses which will be available to the person's data.
An additional problem is created in situations where a person leaves the system or is removed from the collaborative computing system or community, yet has data he/she has created or controls. An example of this scenario occurs when the last manager of the content is deleted from the system. This data is referred to as orphaned data because it is becomes data with no owner. Current systems provide one of three solutions for orphaned data. First, orphaned data can be deleted from the system. This solution can obviously be problematic as needed content may be deleted and rendered permanently unavailable. Second, orphaned data can be made available to the person's manager or other designated administrative entity.
In a pure intranet scenario, this action may be assumed by users of the system. However, such is not necessarily the case in a hosted or internet scenario. This option conveys a false sense of security to the person because they typically have no idea that their content will be made available to others. In other words, the person's expectation of privacy can really be a falsity. Third, orphaned data can be copied to a designated location. It is desirable to have a system and method which provides a set of engagement policies configurable on a person-by-person (user-by-user) basis which sets out to users what content and resource access truly means in their operating environment and what happens with orphaned data.